Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Phishing attacks are becoming common these days. Recently there was a massive phishing attack reported on Hotmail. There are few easy ways by which we can prevent phishing attacks.

I use IE 8 as my default browser and it provides a nice feature known as Smart Screen Filter which helps us in identifying phishing attacks. There is also a online publication provided by Microsoft that helps in identifying phishing attacks.

I follow a simple funda while browsing web sites, whenever I require entering important information like user name, password or financial information, I look at the IE 8's address bar and identify the actual domain name of the URL. IE 8 highlight the domain name by marking it black in color while rest of the url remains grey. This helps a lot. Screen shot of Windows Live login screen is shown below.